Instead of picking your favorite fruit or brew style off the menu, I’d recommend springing for a pretty rainbow of tasters. It’s fun to experience how dynamic sours can be, and the beers’ differences are best savored side by side. On a recent visit, options ranged from the Pêche Fumé (a smoked wheat ale barrel-aged with peaches) to the Sang Noir (a bourbon-barrel-aged red ale with cherries) to the Bourbonic Plague (a blend of sour and imperial porters with dates, vanilla, and orange peel), and there’s often a sour beer on nitro. If you’ve never sampled the latter, put that one at the top of your list: Due to the lack of carbonic acid from carbonation, and the thicker mouthfeel imparted by nitrogen, nitro sours are rounder and allow drinkers to distinguish more of the complexity in their flavor.

The Lodge is the original location, and where Cascade brews its beer; around six of its 18 taps are also reserved for non-sours, which are resurfacing in importance for the brand. But the Barrel House is easily accessible in the city. It serves a full menu, although I like to keep it simple with a cheese-and-charcuterie plate, which pairs well with all that fruited beer. While you’re there, keep an eye out for exciting additions—right now, Cascade is tapping funky fresh-hop sours, something you don’t see every day. The brewery also just began releasing its first cans, including Casual Friday, a sour hazy IPA made in collaboration with Trap Door Brewing.

When Art Larrance and Ron Gansberg left Portland Brewing and started Cascade Brewing in 1998, they had no idea it would be leading the way in sour brewing over 20 years later. While they were Initially specialists in traditional ales, Larrance and Gansberg quickly grew tired of the dominance of big IPAs. Capitalizing on the region’s abundance of local wine barrels and fresh fruit, Cascade took a gamble and began making sours long before they were trendy, stealing hearts and Great American Beer Festival medals.

Bright, tart kettle sours, so named because they’re quickly soured in stainless steel tanks during the brewing process, have become all the rage, but Cascade’s beers take their time, engaging with bacteria and developing complexity as they sour in the barrel. With at least 20 funky, oaky, fruited sour beers on tap, Cascade’s Barrel House on SE Belmont Street, nicknamed the “House of Sour,” is one of the best places in the world to sample different iterations of the style, and to taste how their components interact.

The transition into fall is officially fresh-hop time, and right now Slabtown is celebrating the season with four fresh-hop IPAs on tap, as well as the option to add a French-pressed fresh-hop infusion to a beer of your choosing. The brewery innovated a fresh-hop method (in the vein of Cryo Hops, developed by Yakima Chief Hops) that it’s been using exclusively since 2013. The fresh hops are first frozen on liquid nitrogen, then crushed to extract the lupulin—a fine powder that contains the hop’s essential oils, i.e., its flavor—from the flower, making a homemade cryo powder that avoids the dirt-like taste that can come with using the whole flower. “The process for making fresh-hop beers this way has definitely caught on with a handful of brewers in the Northwest, but it hasn’t become a major national trend,” says Breakside brewmaster Ben Edmunds.

Also of note: The team behind the beers includes three women, among them R&D brewer Natalie Baldwin (known locally as the former lead brewer at now-closed Burnside Brewing Co.), who oversees operations and beer development for the Dekum pub. Sadly, this is still unusual in 2019, so let’s give credit where it’s due.

Almost-10-year-old Breakside Brewery is a major Portland institution, and its impressive range of beers still rakes in awards every year. In 2019 alone, Breakside dominated at the North American Beer Awards, with wins in 10 different categories, and the Oregon Beer Awards crowned it Brewery of the Year within its size division.

Breakside’s third location opened in the rapidly expanding Slabtown neighborhood in 2017, providing NW Portland fans with a huge, high-ceilinged, two-floor brewpub and a big patio. While I love to soak in the vibes at the NE Dekum location, enjoying my beer among the cute hipsters, dogs, and children occupying the sidewalk patio, I think the larger beer selection at Slabtown gives visitors more of a treat. And, though the Dekum spot may offer a more authentically Portland experience, Slabtown is where the brewery workshops more of its hoppy new recipes—always among the most exciting things to taste here, since Breakside makes some of the best IPAs around.

Do yourself a favor and order a flight, so you can taste a few different special releases. Personally, I also like the food better at the Slabtown brewpub, and I often get a hearty vegetarian bowl or fish entrée to offset the impossible-to-resist wings and giant, house-baked soft pretzel with cheese sauce.

The transition into fall is officially fresh-hop time, and right now Slabtown is celebrating the season with four fresh-hop IPAs on tap, as well as the option to add a French-pressed fresh-hop infusion to a beer of your choosing. The brewery innovated a fresh-hop method (in the vein of Cryo Hops, developed by Yakima Chief Hops) that it’s been using exclusively since 2013. The fresh hops are first frozen on liquid nitrogen, then crushed to extract the lupulin—a fine powder that contains the hop’s essential oils, i.e., its flavor—from the flower, making a homemade cryo powder that avoids the dirt-like taste that can come with using the whole flower. “The process for making fresh-hop beers this way has definitely caught on with a handful of brewers in the Northwest, but it hasn’t become a major national trend,” says Breakside brewmaster Ben Edmunds.

Also of note: The team behind the beers includes three women, among them R&D brewer Natalie Baldwin (known locally as the former lead brewer at now-closed Burnside Brewing Co.), who oversees operations and beer development for the Dekum pub. Sadly, this is still unusual in 2019, so let’s give credit where it’s due.

Almost-10-year-old Breakside Brewery is a major Portland institution, and its impressive range of beers still rakes in awards every year. In 2019 alone, Breakside dominated at the North American Beer Awards, with wins in 10 different categories, and the Oregon Beer Awards crowned it Brewery of the Year within its size division.

Breakside’s third location opened in the rapidly expanding Slabtown neighborhood in 2017, providing NW Portland fans with a huge, high-ceilinged, two-floor brewpub and a big patio. While I love to soak in the vibes at the NE Dekum location, enjoying my beer among the cute hipsters, dogs, and children occupying the sidewalk patio, I think the larger beer selection at Slabtown gives visitors more of a treat. And, though the Dekum spot may offer a more authentically Portland experience, Slabtown is where the brewery workshops more of its hoppy new recipes—always among the most exciting things to taste here, since Breakside makes some of the best IPAs around.

Do yourself a favor and order a flight, so you can taste a few different special releases. Personally, I also like the food better at the Slabtown brewpub, and I often get a hearty vegetarian bowl or fish entrée to offset the impossible-to-resist wings and giant, house-baked soft pretzel with cheese sauce.

Today, the region’s seasonal bounties—the city is surrounded by local farmland that’s verdant with hop vines, fruit trees, and wine grapes—provide a ton of inspiration and fresh ingredients. Oregon is well known for its beer and its role as a leader of the cannabis revolution, but the Willamette Valley is also home to some of the best Pinot Noir and Chardonnay in the country, and local breweries are happy to take cues from them, experimenting with grapes and knowing when to put a good wine barrel to use.

Lucky for you (and me!), Portland’s breweries don’t just offer some of the best beer in the country: The city’s creative farm-to-table movement means that even brewpubs can’t get away with lazy food. Because these breweries already use or draw inspiration from seasonal ingredients for their beers, most also serve great food that’s made from scratch with locally sourced produce, meat, dairy, and more.

And I’ve been reading and listening. Brewery staff, beer-nerd friends, and the baristas who support my writing habit all perked up upon learning what I was doing. They asked (with excitement and visible deep concern), “Oohhh, are you including [brewery name]?” I knew I was on the right track, because I never had to say no. It was sweet to hear, in all those sighs of relief, how tied we Portlanders are to our community, and how personally we take our beer.

Consistent high quality. Many of these breweries win accolades year after year, and most release new beers on a regular basis. Some have been around forever and focus on the same recipes Portlanders have loved for years. Whether their beers are mainstays or more gimmicky, they reliably knock our socks off.
They’ve pushed the craft-beer industry forward in some way. These are the breweries that others in the field look up to, which doesn’t necessarily mean they’ve been around for decades—some of the new kids are impressing the old guard, a fact made evident by collaborations and the goodwill of those helping new arrivals get off the ground. All of these are early adopters of new methods and styles; some are bona fide pioneers.

They’re widely adored, and the beer keeps us coming back. This was tricky. Like many Portlanders, I frequent and love a lot of breweries that aren’t on this list; as my winnowing-down process demonstrates, any “best of” list can only scratch the surface. Most of the breweries I’ve selected here offer a combination of great beer, food, and ambience, yet the actual beer is the star of the show. These are the breweries we’re all excited to introduce to visitors. We go back to see what’s new, get our hands on something we’ve just heard about, pay respect, visit an old love, or simply drink a beer that’s better than the rest.
Of course, to refresh my memory of these breweries’ offerings, I’ve also been doing more solo day-drinking lately, as well as taking my toddler straight from day care to visit possible candidates, where she samples the kids’ menu while pointing to my glass and ordering me to drink “mama milk.”

Many craft-beer trends can be traced to the availability of a new ingredient. It’s fair to say that the modern US craft-beer industry began here in 1972, when Oregon State University in Corvallis released the assertive, disease-resistant Cascade hop. That hop would soon become the backbone of two beers that kicked off the boom: Anchor Brewing Company’s Liberty Ale and Sierra Nevada Pale Ale.

Later, between 1984 and 1986, during a time when there were only about 50 breweries in the entire United States, Portland saw the openings of the now-shuttered BridgePort Brewing, Portland Brewing Co., Widmer Brothers, and Oregon’s first brewpub, McMenamins. Back then, Horse Brass Pub, which opened in 1976 and is still around today, was already favoring local beers and microbreweries over major producers. The Criteria
With so many great options within striking distance, choosing just a handful of favorites was no easy feat. I spent a whole mountainous road trip thinking and talking about the favorite breweries of every beer geek and casual drinker I know…and then winced as I crossed off enough names to narrow my list down to 11 spots.

Before the British arrived, njahi (sometimes spelled njahe) was a staple food of the Gikuyu of Central Kenya—it was native to the region, and its drought tolerance greatly enhanced its appeal. Njahi figured largely in Gikuyu culture, occupying an important place in Gikuyu spirituality, and it was associated closely with fertility. Nursing mothers were told “ninguka kuria njahi” (“I will come eat njahi”), which meant that the person saying the phrase would come see the new baby soon. The Gikuyu anthropologist Jomo Kenyatta (in the time before he became a rogue of a president) wrote of how njahi was fed to girls before clitoridectomy was performed. The British colonial writer Elspeth Huxley wrote that njahi was used for divination. Kirima Kia Njahi, a mountain in Central Province (literally “the mountain of njahi”), was believed to be one of the main dwelling places of God. On the lower slopes of the mountain grew njahi cia Ngai (God’s njahi). The long rains season was known as Mibura ya njahi (directly translated as “the season of long rains and harvest of njahi”).

In the end, this reporter realized that what the njahi wars were really about is that some people don’t understand that food is supposed to be tasty. And that maybe the colonizers were right about this one thing.

Editor’s note: Determined to provide a counterpoint—these are the njahi wars, after all!—we’ve asked Kiano Moju to create a rendition of njahi that we’re confident at least some readers will enjoy. You can join the fray by making the dish linked below. It was raining the first time I cooked njahi. As I put the beans to boil, the rain abated, and then ceased. I went back to the living room. I read a book, watched some TV, listened to music, whatever. At some point, the air filled with that particular smell rain produces when it hits dust on the road after a particularly dry stretch, and I was momentarily confused. After a few moments, I realize that the smell was coming from my kitchen. It was the njahi, boiling on the stove.

Boiled njahi is dark brown, and its once white strips had turned into black strips. To cook the njahi, after it has boiled, I used a spare recipe: onions and tomatoes fried in vegetable oil, salt and pepper, a few chiles tossed in, dhania (cilantro) sprinkled on top at the end. I was determined to taste the njahi in-itself. When I told someone that I was making njahi, and she told me she was 99% certain that I would hate it the first time I ate it, I scoffed. Some things are acquired tastes, she said. I don’t believe in acquired tastes when it comes to food. I tell her this is an excuse to explain away bad food.

I served the njahi with steamed rice. The smell of the cilantro plus chiles plus pepper was enticing. I ate the njahi. It was…not bad. But it wasn’t good either. It was…nothing. Its blandness was overpowering. The njahi assaulted me with its blandness, and I immediately thought of the other beans I have stocked in my pantry, and wondered why I hadn’t just made them instead. Njahi’s taste is what I imagine British food tastes like, and I wonder what it means that the British themselves embarked on a deliberate campaign to excise it from the Gikuyu diet.

Given the Kenyan government’s response to the nationwide protests, and everything that’s happened since with regards to police violence, its answer to Njugush seems to be, “No they don’t. Black beans don’t matter.” In other words, njahi’s gonna be njahi’d.

And yet, setting aside Njugush’s metaphor, if the KOT are to be believed, the njahi wars do matter. Martha Karua, who ran for the presidency in Kenya in 2013, is a njahi defender. One of Kaluhi Adagala’s fans frames njahi’s importance succinctly, “My queen @KaluhisKitchen defending us Njahi eaters is the only thing that matters to me rn.” (“You are very good Kaluhi but njahi can’t be saved,” a Twitter user says in retort, illustrating the stakes of it all.)

In that vein, therefore, this reporter decided to purchase his own bag of njahi. He sauntered into the supermarket, spotted the beans, black flat ovoids with a white cap on the side. “Nipee njahi,” he said, acting like this was something he was used to, nailing the pronunciation and everything.

Njahi, as Njugush has it, is ordinary citizens. Njahi is poor people. Njahi is the people who have been shot dead by Kenyan cops in the wake of enforcing COVID-19 curfews, a tally that in the early period of the pandemic rivaled that of the virus itself, even as leading politicians politicked and held massive campaign rallies for an election two years in the future. At the end of the video, Njugush chants, “Black beans matter! Black beans matter!”

It was raining the first time I cooked njahi. As I put the beans to boil, the rain abated, and then ceased. I went back to the living room. I read a book, watched some TV, listened to music, whatever. At some point, the air filled with that particular smell rain produces when it hits dust on the road after a particularly dry stretch, and I was momentarily confused. After a few moments, I realize that the smell was coming from my kitchen. It was the njahi, boiling on the stove.

Immanuel Kant argues that despite the fact that we believe that beauty is in the eyes of the beholder (or, in this case, that flavor is in the tongue of the taster), we debate and argue about our aesthetic judgments in a bid to achieve a certain kind of universality. Perhaps this is what the njahi wars are really about; an attempt to decide, collectively, whether or not njahi is actually food. I don’t know, although I do know Kant never imagined that he’d be cited in the njahi wars of 2017-2021.

Invariably, the njahi wars pale in comparison to the fervor with which the biggest food war in Africa —the jollof war—is waged. The two jollof rice giants, Ghana and Nigeria, battle for supremacy, with each talking about its jollof variant like it’s holy ghost fire. This is a war that Kenya, for some inexplicable reason, has decided it wants to be a part of, with the declaration that its pilau is better than any form of jollof rice. The rules of war journalism state that a reporter should stay objective, and shouldn’t take part in any conflict they’re covering. But this reporter isn’t impartial. This reporter is Kenyan, after all, and thinks that pilau is better than anything jollof.

Nowadays, Kenya is Africa’s largest producer of common beans, but the amount of njahi produced pales in comparison. Because of its relative scarcity, njahi is currently the most expensive bean type in Kenya; while it remains a part of the Gikuyu diet, it has been superseded by other beans, such as the borlotti, which is more commonly referred to in Kenya as the rosecoco.

So njahi is inherently political. But this idea of njahi as a kind of lesser bean, one that’s been usurped by colonial beans, was tapped into last year by the popular Kenyan comedian Njugush, as part of his critique of the Kenyan government, its policies for enforcing Covid-19 curfews, and the epidemic of police violence in the country. On June 2, 2020, at the height of protests over police killings in the US, Njugush posted a video titled “Njahi: Human Beans Matter.” In the clip, Njugush metaphorizes the police killings in both Kenya and the US. “Why do you hate poor lives?” he asks. “Kwa nini mnachukia njahi?”—Why do you hate njahi?

But then came the British. In her paper “Black, White, and Red All over: Beans, Women, and Agricultural Imperialism in Twentieth-Century Kenya,” Claire C. Robertson writes, “The colonial administration sought to impose on Kenya the British model of agriculture, including an approved list of crops to be grown at the exclusion of all others.” Njahi was one of the foods that was to be excluded. By 1939, as W. L. Watt, the Central Province senior agricultural officer, observed, “Njahe had lost its supreme position in the Gikuyu district, due to its being limited to local markets.” The colonial administrators had introduced foreign bean species in the region—in particular French beans, which were meant for export—and established a system of taxation. Since the colonial markets didn’t accept indigenous bean varieties, and farmers needed to sell beans in order to pay the taxes that had been levied by the British, Gikuyu farmers shifted to producing beans for the export market, and no longer cultivated beans like nyagaitho, nyakamandu, ndulei, kamuiru, and wamwetha.

To its detractors, none of this matters. Njahi, according to them, is every negative adjective in the book—disgusting, terrible, atrocious, etc.—and hardly deserves to be called food. Those who do acknowledge it as food often do so only to describe how bad it is: it tastes like 2020; it tastes like a sad only child; it tastes like grief and abandonment issues; it tastes like there’s no internet connection; it tastes like “chalk dust mixed with cement…no matter which way you cook it”; it tastes like unreplied-to emails when you’re unemployed; Leah Kanda, one of Kenya’s leading food bloggers, says it tastes like rusty iron nails cooked in soup. Et cetera.

At the heart of the njahi wars is the question of who gets to determine which foods are tasty. But at the real heart of these wars, as with a lot of other wars, is the violence of British colonialism.

Get to know Kenya’s iconic love-it-or-hate-it ingredient. There’s been a war simmering on Kenyan food Twitter for some time. It was all brought to the fore when Kaluhi Adagala, arguably the biggest food writer in Kenya, having been featured in best-of lists on HuffPost, Cosmo, CNN, etc., posted a recipe for njahi, and Kenyans on Twitter (KOT) reacted. One irate KOT wrote, “Njahi Defence Association have hired their strongest weapon, Kaluhi to unleash proper PR on that prison food.”

On one side of the njahi wars, led by Adagala, are its defenders, who extol its virtues. Njahi (scientific name Lablab purpureus, black beans/dolichos/hyacinth bean/etc. in English) is a black bean with a white stripe running down its middle. It tastes wonderful, is a good source of insoluble fiber; it’s said to cleanse the gut, reduce blood pressure, play a key role in blood sugar regulation by slowing down the release of simple sugars, facilitate the body’s removal of excess fluids through the kidneys; and it contains compounds known as phenols, which supposedly help to reduce weight.

A mixture of tangy cheeses and aromatic herbs create a vibrant filling.
Squeezing the spinach dry prevents the filling and the pie from being soggy.
Using clarified butter yields crispier boreks.
Delicate, gossamer-thin phyllo is a forgiving material to work with, once you know how to handle it.
Along with cured olives, string cheese, dried apricots, walnut halves, and cured meats like basturma (the Armenian equivalent of bresaola) and sujuk (spiced Armenian sausage), boreks are required for any Armenian mezze spread. Using clarified butter yields crispier boreks. I don’t know if that’s 100% true for every Armenian household, but I’ve yet to attend a single gathering of more than a couple of Armenians where boreks weren’t served. (My mother keeps containers of unbaked boreks in her freezer at all times, just in case.) Aromatic herbs and alliums like parsley, dill, and scallion are common additions to either style, and eggs are usually added as a binder.

Assembling boreks is easy if you abide by some guidelines for working with phyllo dough, which is somewhat delicate. Since the phyllo turns brittle if left at refrigerator temperatures for more than a day or two, keep it frozen for as long as possible. When you want to use it, plan ahead, as you’ll want to transfer it to the fridge overnight or leave it at room temperature for at least four hours. To prevent it from drying out and causing breakage, be sure to let the dough sit in its sealed packaging at room temperature for at least 30 minutes. Since most phyllo is sold in one-pound packages, you can take what you need (plus a few extra sheets in case one or two tear beyond repair), gently reroll the remainder, wrap the roll in plastic, place it in a zipper-lock bag, and refreeze for up to two weeks.

When working with phyllo, keep the stack of sheets covered with a piece of parchment or wax paper weighed down by a dry kitchen towel (do not use a damp towel, despite what some recipes recommend). Finally, keep in mind that minor tears or cracks won’t be noticeable once the borek is folded and assembled, especially if they end up on the inside, so don’t worry too much as you work with it.

Andrew Janjigian
For this recipe, which gives you the option of both types of fillings, I hewed closely to the spirit of my mother’s, while making a few refinements and flourishes of my own. For the cheese filling, I kept the Muenster and feta cheeses, and added goat cheese, which upped both the mixture’s creaminess and its subtle funk (using a sheep’s milk feta here, rather than more demure cow’s milk feta, is best for achieving that notable funkiness). The spinach filling also uses both feta and goat cheese for similar reasons, and gives you the option of using greens other than frozen spinach, such as fresh spinach, watercress, arugula, Swiss chard, or beet greens (see notes section below). In both versions, I increased the quantities of herbs significantly. I also found that clarifying the butter used to assemble the boreks helps keep them crisp. And, for a final bit of flair, I like to garnish mine with a mixture of sesame and nigella seeds.

Boreks—or borags, beregs, boregs, boeregs, depending upon who’s doing the spelling (they’re all pronounced the same)—are buttery, crisp, multilayered phyllo hand pies, filled with cheese, greens, vegetables, meat, or some combination thereof. They’re usually triangle-shaped, although tray-style boreks, baked in a pan and then cut into squares, are also common. They’re beloved by Armenians, but are equally prized throughout the countries that were once a part of the Ottoman Empire, such as Albania, Bulgaria, Turkey, Greece, and Serbia.

While boreks can be made with puff pastry or yufka, a more rustic pastry dough that sits midway between a pasta and phyllo in thickness and heft, the vast majority of Armenian boreks are made using phyllo dough. The most common filling for Armenian boreks is either a mixture of cheeses—typically melty ones like Muenster or Monterey Jack, tangy feta, and something creamy, like cottage or cream cheese—or a combination of cheese and cooked, well-drained spinach.